69249454-chandler-semiotics

CHALLENGING THE LITERAL 125
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the street corner than in Shakespeare. Roland Barthes declared that
‘no sooner is a form seen than it must resemble something: humanity
seems doomed to analogy’ (Barthes 1977b, 44). The ubiquity of
tropes in visual as well as verbal forms can be seen as reflecting our
fundamentally relational understanding of reality. Reality is framed
within systems of analogy. Figures of speech enable us to see one
thing in terms of another. A trope such as metaphor can be regarded
as a new sign formed from the signifier of one sign and the signified
of another (Figure 4.1) (cf. Jakobson 1966, 417). The signifier
thus stands for a different signified; the new signified replaces the
usual one. As I will illustrate, the tropes differ in the nature of these
substitutions.
In seventeenth-century England, the scientists of the Royal
Society sought ‘to separate knowledge of nature from the colours of
rhetoric, the devices of the fancy, the delightful deceit of the fables’
(Thomas Sprat, 1667: The History of the Royal Society of London
for the Improving of Natural Knowledge). They saw the ‘trick of
metaphors’ as distorting reality. An attempt to avoid figurative
language became closely allied to the realist ideology of objectivism.
Language and reality, thought and language, and form and content
are regarded by realists as separate, or at least as separable. Realists
favour the use of the ‘clearest’, most ‘transparent’ language for the
accurate and truthful description of facts. However, language isn’t
glass (as the metaphorical references to clarity and transparency
suggest), and it is unavoidably implicated in the construction of the
world as we know it. Banishing metaphor is an impossible task since
it is central to language. Ironically, the writings of the seventeenthcentury
critics of rhetoric – such as Sprat, Hobbes and Locke – are
themselves richly metaphorical. Those drawn towards philosophical
signified
signifier
FIGURE 4.1 Substitution in tropes
signified
signifier
signified
signifier